Enterprise Place, Beachwood, Ohio

Prominently overlooking Cleveland’s busy East Side interchange of Chagrin Boulevard and Interstate 271 in Beachwood, Ohio, is Enterprise Place, a five-story, 125,000 square foot office building completed in 1986.

In the early 1980s, Frank Porter, Sr. was the owner of 30 acres of prime real estate abutting the highway interchange, land he envisioned as the eventual home of a cluster of high-end auto dealerships. The City of Beachwood had other plans, however. As Beachwood had in the previous decades become a prime corporate office address — especially along the Chagrin Boulevard corridor from Green Road east to the interstate — the City wished to capitalize on and expand that success into ‘Science Park’, a proposed hybrid corporate office/tech development concept.

Once the required Science Park rezoning took effect, Mr. Porter opted to build a series of office structures and a hotel. He enlisted The Architects Collaborative (TAC) of Cambridge, MA, a firm founded in 1945 by renowned Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, to masterplan the overall development, and to prepare the architectural design of the first structure. TAC was one of the first notable firms in the U.S. to emphasize a collaborative teamwork approach to architectural practice, often allowing all members of the firm to actively participate in individual project design.

The resulting structure stands today as a stacked-cube assemblage of white precast panels and banded glass, piped with red accents. Its five floors recede and serrate, creating multiple corner offices having great views, and allowing for a number of posh penthouse suites with individual rooftop terraces. The building’s form embraces its roundabout drop-off, with flagpoles and landscaping decorating its main lobby entrance. Parking is arrayed about the building’s base. Enterprise Place remains one of the most elegant and visually striking of Beachwood’s many corporate office buildings.

Despite their design success with Enterprise Place, The Architects Collaborative suffered financial troubles throughout the remainder of the 1980s that contributed to the firm’s eventual demise in 1988. Harvard University acquired the architectural firm’s headquarters building in Cambridge in lieu of moneys owed.

Enterprise Place was acquired jointly by Goldberg Companies and Forest City Enterprises in 1998, and successive improvements were then made to the building and grounds. A free-standing P. F. Chang’s China Bistro restaurant was also added to the property’s frontage on Chagrin Boulevard.